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Books
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Learning from 1798?: Northern Ireland’s Upcoming Decade of Commemorations
Last year, the Lilliput Press released a new extended edition of Tom Dunne’s Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize winning book, Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798. First published in 2004, Dunne’s book provoked considerable controversy with its critique of the ‘commemorationist’ history that Dunne believed dominated the 1998 commemorations of the 1798 Rebellion. The book blasted the involvement [...] read our review » -
The ANC, the IRA and the rise of influence of the left within Sinn Fein…
World by Storm has a nice piece up on the IRA’s role in helping MK, the armed wing of the ANC, in the 1980s. In particular he sees a strange alchemy at work there: …if one can think of a clearly legitimate contemporary struggle it was that against apartheid and it is to the credit [...] read our review »
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Stay out of Libya: counterinsurgency doesn’t work
A moment of some significance in journalism perhaps, as the New York Times reviews the current talked about book, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan by Bing West. The author is no bleeding heart but a former assistant Defense Secretary from the Reagan era who stomped his way round the Afghan [...] read our review »
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Comment on Lost and Found: In Search of Owen Roe O’Neill
on 21 May 2012 at 10:35 am
Proinnceas Seosamh Bigger’s output and effort was prodigious and we owe him a lot for his early conservationism. However too much of this material skates over his politics which were hard-line separatist, anglophobic, laced with saccharin romantic nationalism. Even the Linen Hall library banned him. He was responsible for the republicanising of many in Belfast – for good and evil and the Belfast-linked seeding of the Easter Rising.
Brigid Matthews, the housekeeper’s opposition to Alice Stopford Green moving in to Ardrigh was couched by Bigger in terms of the difficulty of having two women in charge of domestic matters.
Interestingly, if unrelatedly, Joe Devlin MP lived in Ardrigh in later years.
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Comment on The withering of Irish Catholicism sees Sunday attendance plummet in the cities…
on 18 May 2012 at 3:50 pm
Proves that Catholic nationalism is ethnic not religious as the SF vote just keeps rising.
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Comment on Lost and Found: In Search of Owen Roe O’Neill
on 18 May 2012 at 11:56 am
A great deal of satisfying historical detail and proper scepticism of romantic images and legends here. Now for the inaccuracies I know about or information I was not aware of:
Senator Joseph Warwick Bigger (TCD Professor of Bacteriology) was the nephew of Francis Joseph Bigger (FJB) not his brother. It was he who disclosed how they both burned Casement’s 1914 diary (and presumably related correspondence) and was duly threatened by Patrick McCartan (latterly of Clann na Poblachta): “I hope to get Sean Russell or some of the boys to visit Bigger and give him some ‘friendly advice’. He had no right to stick his nose in here.”
Brigid Mathews was indeed FJB’s housekeeper at Ardrigh on the Antrim Road but most certainly was not his common law wife. If anyone came close to that role it was his chauffeur Tom.
It was also rumoured, unfairly, that FJB “was interested in the boy scout movement…the Greeks had a name for Francis Joseph Bigger’s habits and that he needed none to show him how to scout for boys” (WJ Maloney).
FJB, a solicitor and antiquarian, certainly cultured boys into romantic nationalism and separatism in Belfast (like Herbert Hughes, the musician) but there is no evidence of related misdemeanour.
Castle Seán in Ardglass (FJB’s renovated country home) was later granted to the government of Northern Ireland by Joseph Bigger, on condition that no flag decorate it save one bearing the “Red Right Hand of Ulster on a white ground,” to be flown on 17 July – FJB’s birthday. The building was then, accurately if unromantically, renamed by officials ‘Jordan’s Castle’.
Joseph Bigger inherited the bulk of FJB’s estate (will in PRONI) aside from an annuity for Bridget.
I’d be interested as to when, and how extensive, the later loyalist vandalism was, and is the flag properly flown on 17 July?
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Comment on Ian Junior claimed £10,000 in postage in his six last months in office…
on 15 May 2012 at 3:37 pm
I know from experience that an MP, let alone an MLA, gets at most an average of 20 letters a day that aren’t circulars.
To take away £10,000 of stamped envelopes means Paisley was using them for propaganda purposes not for constituency responses.
There is a word for that sort of needless expenses claim. Others have ended up in court for less.
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Comment on If politicians in the south are feeling strong enough to ‘come out’, why not the north?
on 12 May 2012 at 10:01 am
Seymour – blaming prejudice in candidate selection doesn’t explain why no SF or SDLP MLA or MP is or has been gay given both parties have long had exceptionally pro-gay policies.
That UU 2007 survey is very dubious. One telling oddity was that Canada equalled Northern Ireland in the level of homophobia of its bigoted people.
Perhaps the respondents here and there are just more honest.
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Comment on Licence fee freeze leads BBC NI slashes top journalist jobs…
on 11 May 2012 at 11:18 pm
ranger1640 asks why “publicly funded employees are getting in their words “a generous offer”??? In these alleged straightened times why are they not getting the industrial average redundancy package???”
‘Straitened,’ but anyway Ranger, you seem not to have noticed only the public sctor can afford, and of course expects, enormous redundancy packages. The BBC is notorious for such whoppers which is why the staff are happy, if not eager to depart.
The real reason for the redundancies is not that the BBC has “been forced to cut 20% of its £3.5bn UK-wide budget as a result of the freezing of the licence fee.” This is of course entirely inaccurate, but don’t expect the Corporation to dispute the figure. 20% inflation p.a.?
The real reason is that the BBC is taking £905m from our licence fee money to plug the hole in its pension fund, which is growing bigger because of these very redundancies!
Would that newspapers could levy a compulsory poll tax as they might survive. Instead we will have a single media outlet with only one journalist on a gargantuan salary.
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Comment on If politicians in the south are feeling strong enough to ‘come out’, why not the north?
on 11 May 2012 at 9:14 pm
Interesting in a way, that nobody even recalls the Alliance Party has three gay councillors,
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Comment on Euro crisis: “Hollande is man of the moment, but Europe’s gaze is firmly fixed on Athens”
on 8 May 2012 at 9:43 pm
The Greeks cling to the euro because it is the gift that keeps on giving. Obviously if it was whipped out from underneath them there would be the mother of all economic collapses. As it is going to happen, one way or another best to get the June bailout money first.
What brand of Trot is that far-left leader asked to form a government? Too smooth to be Militant. He’s no Tommy Sheridan.
Spain is different despite their wobbly banks.One hopes any difficulties Santander faces won”t read across to us – Gordon Brown was rather too keen to offload our dud building societies on to the Spanish.
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Comment on Hollande wins in France…
on 8 May 2012 at 1:33 pm
Markets rise and fall but invisibly discount future events. Watch for the unexpected one.
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Comment on Greece: “Country in Limbo”
on 7 May 2012 at 9:49 pm
Let the Trots form a minority government.
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